The Umbrella Academy S4E5: Six Years, Five Months, Two Days
So last week, Five and Lila got very, very lost, on the metaphysical subway that connects the show’s disparate timelines. So lost, in fact, it takes the six years, five months, and two days of the episode title to find their way out. We cover that time in a wordless montage that show them methodically check off stop by stop, as the intimacy and bond between them grows.
Five’s been through this before — last time he was stuck in time, it took decades for him to get unstuck. But even if that hadn’t been the case, he and Lila are the Umbrellas best equipped to deal with this kind of situation without panicking or doing anything rash. And Ritu Arya and Aiden Gallagher — always standouts in the cast — are able to give depth to Lila and Five’s growing relationship without any dialogue, as the pair go from frustration to laughing together at their situation, to genuine tenderness — something Lila never quite had with Diego, and Five has never had with anyone.
Meanwhile, Viktor’s slowly developing a parent-child relationship with this timeline’s Reginald, who both isn’t and isn’t the man who raised him and the other Umbrellas. They’re still at odds on what to do about Ben — Reg wants to kill him for the sake of saving the world; Viktor still believes he can save Ben, and then the world. They disagree, but they’re at least willing to hear each other out, which is more than Original Reg would have done, and probably more than Viktor would have done a few seasons ago.
Complicating things is that Ben doesn’t want to be helped. He and Jennifer had sex, and he doesn’t seem to care that the result was a major earthquake, a ton of dead birds, and a motel desk clerk spewing black bile from every orifice (this show loves its unnecessary gore). He’s happy with Jen, is still resentful of Viktor, Reg, and the rest of the family, and either doesn’t grasp that catastrophic stakes of his new relationship, or simply doesn’t care.
But Viktor and Reg aren’t the only ones looking for Bennifer. Mysterious dry cleaner David Cross reveals to Drs. Jean & Gene Thibodeaux that “that tentacle boy” who helped Jennifer escape their clutches is the key to starting the world-ending Cleanse they’ve all been looking forward to. It’s still not clear — to us or the Thibodeauxs — who this guy is or how he knows all this stuff. Or, most importantly, what his agenda is. But Gene, who’s been weirdly hostile to him from the get-go, chases him off before bothering to find out.
But Bennifer aren’t the couple this episode is really concerned with, it’s Lila and Five. And after six and a half years of timeline-hopping, they give up. They find a nice, peaceful timeline, and tend a greenhouse together as a gentle romance blossoms between the two. (It doesn’t really make sense that they’d wait six years to get together, even given the age gap and the fact that Lila’s married, but it’s still a sweet moment when it happens.) And then while exploring the subway station that got them to this timeline, Five discovers extensive notes on how to get home again, written by… himself. Whether it’s some future, past, or alternate-timeline version doesn’t matter, what matters is that he’s happy enough that he tucks the notes away and doesn’t tell Lila. He’s not ready to spoil their reverie and get back to the real world just yet.
But it’s the second-to-last episode. So of course they’re coming back, of course the bad guys will find Bennifer, and of course there’s another looming apocalypse. Like last week, this episode had a killer opening, followed by a lot of setup and a lot of filler (you could have cut Luther, Diego, Allison, and Klaus from the show two episodes ago and lost basically nothing), but it worked in a way the previous episode didn’t for two reasons. The Lila-Five and Reg-Viktor pairings were more invested in the characters than simply moving the story along. And it builds to the best kind of surprise reveal — one that comes completely out of left field, but also makes sense within the convoluted story. Not to mention, throws one more unpredictable variable into the equation as we head into the final episode.
Stray thoughts:
• This week in unnecessary subplots: Diego and Luther get a tour of the CIA. If Five and Lila are the Umbrellas best-suited to be lost in the multiverse, these two jabronis are the least suited to the world of spycraft, and the real CIA agents clock them immediately. Also, Klaus was buried alive last week. He can’t die, but he’s stuck. Allison comes to the rescue, and for some reason her powers have changed from mind control to moving things with her mind. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but we also don’t care.
• At one point, they set up Luther for a Captain America-style elevator fight, and then just cut to the aftermath, which feels like cheating the audience.
• It’s not clear whether Lila and Five’s greenhouse timeline had any other living people, or even extended much beyond the greenhouse. The first two seasons of Umbrella felt like they took place in the real world; this season and last seem to happen in a liminal space where no one exists who doesn’t have to do with the story. For example, this season I think the last time we saw a single extra who wasn’t either working for Hargreeves or the Thibodeaux’s cult was the audience at Luther’s low-rent strip club. It doesn’t actually hurt the show all that much, given a certain amount of unreality is baked into the cake, but there was something to be said for the Umbrellas’ world feeling a bit more lived-in.